Codesys Software PLC Solution

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) have been around since the late 60´s. They are basically digital computers adapted to industrial automation needs and are largely used in the most diverse manufacturing plants.

Our partner Codesys has a software PLC solution which can be deployed on our ARM based System on Module families (Colibri and Apalis) in order to transform the module into a PLC solution. It is the perfect fit for use cases where the device end-user must have the capacity to program the device behavior. See the list of Devices using Codesys (you see some famous PLC brands like Beckhoff, Wago and Eaton).

Toradex and Codesys have joined forces and created one demo image for Toradex Colibri iMX6DL modules. The demo pre-built image can be downloaded here and contains the Codesys Runtime demo running for two hours before shut down. The demo image has the following features enabled:

Download the pre-build image (tar.bz2 or zip) and extract its contents to a FAT formatted SD card. For Windows users, a program such as 7-zip can be used; if you are a Linux user:

tar xjvf codesys.tar.bz2 -C <path-to-your-sd-card-mount-point>

Use the SD card to flash the Colibri iMX6DL module. Insert the card on the Carrier Board and stop the booting process. If your module is booting from Eboot (Windows CE), you will have to flash the U-Boot bootloader using the recovery mode. If your module already has the U-Boot bootloader, follow the steps for flashing Linux described here, which in most cases consists on stopping the boot process and running:

run setupdate
run update

Since this is a demo image, access to the Linux terminal is not allowed to customers.

The image automatically starts Codesys Runtime when booting the module. Notice that the Ethernet port configuration of the module is: IP address 192.168.10.2 and default gateway as 192.168.10.1. Being so, you may use point-to-point communication and configure your computer in the same network with IP address 192.168.10.1

Back to the host PC, download and install Codesys Development Tool. Our tests were conducted using Codesys v3.5 SP9 Patch3.